One Piece - Eiichiro Oda

One Piece is one of the greatest manga of all time, and is number two on my top ten manga of the decade. Of all the manga I used to follow as a kid, One Piece is the only one I still keep up with. I started watching the anime in lower school in front of our small tv during dinner, started reading the manga around middle school, and I’ve been following it weekly ever since. That means it’s been about 15 years of One Piece for me, 15 years of waiting patiently and consistently week after week for a new chapter from Alabasta as a kid to Wano as an adult today, 15 years of being astonished and delighted and blown away by Oda. It has been one of the biggest pleasures of my life to be able to consistently enjoy One Piece through all these different periods/ stages; nothing else that has stayed with me for this long through this many different versions of me each with different interests. Even after over a decade, I’m still deeply fascinated and surprised by the world building in One Piece, and still feel deeply personally invested in the characters and story that Oda has created. There are so many well planned arcs, so many heart wrenching stories, so many hype panels, so much rich detail, that even after all this time I’m still just as excited and giddy about One Piece as I was as a kid.

Naruto - Masashi Kishimoto

Even though the ending of Naruto is eternally painful for me, Naruto is an important one to mention. I started Naruto in middle school and continued a devotee (albeit a more and more disgruntled devotee) until it ended around my junior year. Before Naruto, I previously just watched anime on TV during dinner time, so Naruto was my first foray into manga, and it defined my experience. It was the first time I spent time outside of the standard dinner TV time to engage with and consume manga, and as a kid I think I even enjoyed Naruto more than I did One Piece. I love endings so I get extremely biased by bad endings, but disregarding the end, Naruto was truly one of the greats. It did so many things well, and I think during its run really set the tone / style of a lot of shounen.

Full Metal Alchemist - Hiromu Arakawa

While I love One Piece dearly and consider it one of the greats, in my opinion Full Metal Alchemist is #1, the goat shounen. In every possible way shounen can reasonably be judged, FMA is perfect: the story telling, characters, art, pacing, ending, power system, power scaling, humor, length, theme, sequencing of arcs, everything is absolutely perfect. 10/10. This tweet sums up my opinions well: “you should never feel pressure to write the perfect story, not because it doesn't exist, but because it does exist, and hiromu arakawa finished fullmetal alchemist in 2010 so chill out guys the pressure is off all of us.” Everyone else sit down.

Eyeshield 21 - Riichiro Inagaki & Yusuke Murata

Eyeshield 21 is my favorite sports manga (and there are sooo many good ones). Some Important elements of a good sports manga are: good protagonists (typically 2 or 3 main characters in an underdog team), interesting and visually/ thematically distinguishable opponents, a training arc, and the big tournament arc (sometimes 2). Eyeshield 21 has all of those elements:

• Sena and Raimon both have great story arcs and good contrasting personalities
• The main supporting characters, Hiruma and Kurita are obviously great and also have good contrasting personalities (bonus: they contrast in very different ways than Sena and Raimon)
• Deimon Devil Bats start out a terrible team (great name though)
• The training arc in america is sick. The pebble scene and the truck pushing are very cool and fun. The coach backstory is short and suitably balanced between touching / cheesy.
• The tournament arc and the subsequent final world arc were both very enjoyable. My one gripe is I think the final tournament arc was the better one and the manga would’ve been great if it ended there too. Something about the worlds arc made it feel more like a sequel than a necessary finale.

Kekkaishi - Yellow Tanabe

Kekkaishi is another A+ shounen. I watched the anime as a kid but only appreciated the greatness of the manga when i got a bit older. It Hits the mark on everything I look for in a shounen: reasonable power curve, compelling story, villains that aren’t surprising / come out of nowhere, good characters that learn and grow and develop, interesting / reasonable power system, and manages to do it over hundreds of chapters (FMA, while perfect, is a tight 100 chapters, and one piece, while perfect, is a very lengthy 1000+).

Oyasumi Punpun - Inio Asano

Oyasumi Punpun is on the list for two things-- art and theme, both very intertwined. Artistically, out of all the manga I’ve read, Punpun is the one that best uses the medium of manga, made to be read from panel to panel, unfolding and transitioning from page to page. From hyper realistic close ups of eyes, hands or grotesque expressions, Asano quickly shifts the POV of the next panel to a wide panorama where the characters are almost hidden in their surroundings. It is a very jarring experience to move without transition from the intimacy of an emotional close-up to the homogeneity of a wide frame panel of a busy street, a type of art and expression only possible because of the way manga is created and consumed. Part of what makes the art so good is also how it supports the characters and the theme. Depicting Punpun and his family as birds is brilliant. The juxtaposition of Punpun and his family's normal visual simplicity as cartoony birds with the occasional hyper realistic panels of certain body parts makes those important moments hit extremely hard. It also helps make the story more vivid and visceral, because Punpun’s horrifying visual transformation from innocent little bird to monster mirrors his self destructive internal transformation.

Monster - Naoki Urasawa

I love all of Urasawa’s work, but Monster is my favorite.The art is decent but not amazing; what Monster does better than almost any other manga that I’ve read is exposition & characterization. The twists are actually surprising and the story is seriously gripping, one of the best psychological thrillers I've ever read (novel or manga or otherwise). There are only two main protagonists, so most of the characters come and go, but all of them are important to the story and serve to further develop the plot. Despite their short appearances (so many people die...), in 1-2 chapters Urasawa can make you genuinely care about every characters, and he does a great job of showing not only the good and the bad of people but the nuances in between. Each character has a motivating back story, and very few characters are easily bucketed as good or bad. Every mini arc is so compelling on its own with only a short amount of time, but they also each fit very nicely into a whole picture too, building the overall story and suspense super well.

Vinland Saga - Makoto Yukimura

Vinland Saga had a fantastic start (Thorfinn the viking arc) but it's on the list because the second arc is one of my favorite manga arcs. The first thing that I admire about that arc is how big of a tone shift it is. It’s so different from the previous one that it feels almost like a completely different manga, but the progression is smooth instead of jarring or unbelievable, and as a cohesive story, the transition from fighting to farming reinforces the primary purpose and message of the manga. The second is the art. The art in Vinland Saga is consistently very good in both the first and the second arc (in combat, impact is so palpable it’s almost tactile), but the second arc is especially memorable because of the raw emotional strength of some panels and dialogue. The panel of Thorfinn standing with the soldiers behind him, his face almost unrecognizably bruised, and the “I have no enemies” line is maybe one of the greatest panels in manga ever. Incredible stuff.

Jujutsu Kaisen - Gegu Akutami

A relatively new addition to Shounen Jump, Jujutsu Kaisen is my favorite of the more recent generation of jump series (p.s. anime adaption coming soon). Jujutsu Kaisen successfully subverts a lot of shounen tropes without being absolutely ridiculous (aka One Punch Man, which is also good), has a very interesting power system (the complexity reminds me of HxH, specifically the detail of and careful thought behind nen fights), is in general very smart and interesting (many panels and dialogue are very thought provoking), has excellent, distinctive characters, and phenomenal art.

A few points there merit more detail.

On tropes: the biggest subversion is Gojo. Really early on in the manga, he introduces Gojo Satoru, a character so unreasonably overpowered that any typical plot point around a straightforward power struggle loses its urgency. One Punch Man deals with that by being absurd and centering the plot around that. Jujutsu Kaisen deals with that by being very clever about the plot, creating compelling and different storylines where antagonists play around Gojo, only possible because JK has tremendously smart writing.
On the power system & philosophy: characters don’t get stronger because of the exalted power of friendship. Two power ups are particularly memorable to me: one because “your hands can’t develop faster than your eyes, and if you lose eyes capable of discerning between good and bad your hands performing work won’t wish for improvement,” and the other because “with a firm base, skill, and imagination, a person can change thanks to the slightest of events.” Both of these are smart and true.
On art: one of the key parts of shounen is action. The art is JK is not only beautiful (territorial expansions are very cool and very creative), but the action is easy to understand and follow, panels are clear and clean, important climaxes are punchy, and everything just generally flows very well.

Silver Spoon - Hiromu Arakawa

Silver Spoon is not just my number one manga of the decade but my favorite manga of all time. It is by the same author of FMA, but it is a pretty different manga & a totally different genre. The main story revolves around Hachiken, a disillusioned city kid who goes to a far away farming school for his high school education. I started reading Silver Spoon when I was profoundly and painfully depressed in my sophomore year of college and it was one of the few bright spots of my life. Reading about hachiken learning and growing on the farm was very healing for me at a time when I was feeling very stressed about accomplishments and school. No other manga has had the same emotional impact on me.

HM: Space Brothers, Kingdom, Tower of God, Haikyuu, Kimetsu no Yaiba, Grand Blue, Hunter x Hunter, Mushishi, Zatch Bell, 20th Century Boys